The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories

The Glass Slipper: Women and Love Stories

by Susan Ostrov Weisser (Author)

Synopsis

Why is the story of romance in books, magazines, and films still aimed at women rather than at men? Even after decades of feminism, traditional ideas and messages about romantic love still hold sway and, in our postfeminist age, are more popular than ever. Increasingly, we have become a culture of romance: stories of all kinds shape the terms of love. Women, in particular, love a love story.

The Glass Slipper is about the persistence of a familiar Anglo-American love story into the digital age. Comparing influential classics to their current counterparts, Susan Ostrov Weisser relates in highly amusing prose how these stories are shaped and defined by and for women, the main consumers of romantic texts. Following a trajectory that begins with Jane Austen and concludes with Internet dating sites, Weisser shows the many ways in which nineteenth-century views of women's nature and the Victorian idea of romance have survived the feminist critique of the 1970s and continue in new and more ambiguous forms in today's media, with profound implications for women.

More than a book about romance in fiction and media, The Glass Slipper illustrates how traditional stories about women's sexuality, femininity, and romantic love have survived as seemingly protective elements in a more modern, feminist, sexually open society, confusing the picture for women themselves. Weisser compares diverse narratives-historical and contemporary from high literature and low genres-discussing novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Victorian women's magazines, and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; Disney movies; popular Harlequin romance novels; masochistic love in films; pornography and its relationship to romance; and reality TV and Internet ads as romantic stories.

Ultimately, Weisser shows that the narrative versions of the Glass Slipper should be taken as seriously as the Glass Ceiling as we see how these representations of romantic love are meant to inform women's beliefs and goals. In this book, Weisser's goal is not to shatter the Glass Slipper, but to see through it.

$27.53

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 254
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 30 Aug 2013

ISBN 10: 0813561779
ISBN 13: 9780813561776

Media Reviews
The Glass Slipper is a fine addition to gender and popular culture studies. Its sound scholarship and engaging, witty style demonstrate that the more things change, the more they too often stay the same. - Elayne Rapping, State University of New York at Buffalo With her lively and witty style, Weisser argues in this absorbing and ambitious work that our culture is dominated by fundamentally conservative assumptions about romantic love, marriage, and gender. - Robyn Warhol, The Ohio State University
Author Bio
Susan Ostrov Weisser is a professor of English at Adelphi University. She is the author of A Craving Vacancy: Women and Sexual Love in the British Novel 1740-1880, and the editor of Women and Romance: A Reader, as well as three scholarly editions of classic novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and D. H. Lawrence.